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Galileo sat-nav system experiences service outage
Europe's satellite-navigation system, Galileo, has suffered a major outage. The network has been offline since Friday due to what has been described as a "technical incident related to its ground infrastructure". The problem means all receivers, such as the latest smartphone models, will not be picking up any useable timing or positional information.
These devices will be relying instead on the data coming from the American Global Positioning System (GPS). Depending on the sat-nav chip they have installed, cell phones and other devices might also be making connections with the Russian (Glonass) and Chinese (Beidou) networks.
[...] The specialist sat-nav publication Inside GNSS said sources were telling it that the problem lay with a fault at a Precise Timing Facility (PTF) in Italy. A PTF generates and curates the reference time against which all clocks in the Galileo system are checked and calibrated.
The function on Galileo satellites that picks up distress beacon messages for search and rescue is said to be unaffected by the outage.
[...] Europe's alternative to GPS went "live" with initial services in December 2016 after 17 years of development. The European Commission promotes Galileo as more than just a back-up service; it is touted also as being more accurate and more robust.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday July 15 2019, @05:43PM
The project is super delayed and isn't supposed to be production ready for at least another year. So delayed that some of the first satellites have already been decommissioned LOL.
In theory when its in production mode, there will be dual ground stations in Italy and Bavaria. Since its not in production, heck who knows maybe Bavaria isn't built yet.
My gut level guess is some kind of disaster recovery test was attempted as part of production-rating the system, and it failed.
The concept of having two and exactly only two standard time services sounds weird to me. Man with one clock knows the time. Man with three clocks can rub them up against each other to create a valid statistical model of long term drift so he REALLY knows what time it is. Man with only two clocks has no friggn idea what time it actually is.
For a variety of fascinating political, military, and economic competition reasons, this testing failure is being heavily marketed as a production failure.